


Care and Feeding After Midnight

by Chash



Series: Holiday Fills 2018 [8]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-12 11:06:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16871806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/pseuds/Chash
Summary: Bellamy's family has been in charge of guarding a portal to the human realm for generations, making sure no one gets through, causing minor mischief, doing all the stuff gremlins are supposed to.But then the wardrobe's owner dies and it ends up going to a med student, and Bellamy, who's always liked the human realm a little too much, finds himself doing things gremlins definitely aren't supposed to do.





	Care and Feeding After Midnight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wanttobeatree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/gifts).



> Got a couple "based on a weird Bellarke dream I had" prompts this year and I'm here for it.

Bellamy discovers that Mr. Wallace has died when he leaves his wardrobe at midnight and sets off an alarm.

Obviously, he doesn't immediately understand that Mr. Wallace has _died_ , just that the wardrobe has moved and his routine will need to change. He slips into the shadows of the nether realm as the alarms continue to blare, studying the room. At first, it feels a great deal like Mr. Wallace's house, musty and full of odd, old things, but the layout is different, and once his eyes adjust to looking at the human realm through the veil, it snaps into place: an antique store.

As new places to live go, it's not particularly convenient, especially if they have motion-sensor alarms. Bellamy's family had a good thing going with the Wallaces, whether the Wallaces knew it or not. Dante had taken pride in his old house full of peculiar items, had loved to brag that it was connected to the spirit world. Bellamy had done his part by rattling doors, moving objects from within the faerie realm, and generally being an odd spiritual presence, and, in return, Mr. Wallace had (whether he knew it or not) kept the Blake's wardrobe, which really _was_ the gateway to another world.

Bellamy had known the arrangement wouldn't last forever. Dante might have liked his haunted house, but his son Cage never had, and Bellamy hadn't expected him to maintain the property as his father would have wanted. So something must have happened to the old man, and his son sold all of his belongings.

It's not really good for Bellamy, broadly speaking. Once he's _in_ the human realm, he can leave easily enough, slipping through any number of convenient pockets of shadow, but to _get_ to the human realm, he has to go through the portal in the wardrobe, which apparently now leads to motion-sensor alarms. 

So that's annoying.

The next night, he doesn't actually leave the wardrobe before shifting to the nether realm, and from there he finds and disconnects the alarm, goes back to the wardrobe, and comes out into the human realm again. It's more steps than he'd like to take, but he can at least grab one of the antique store's business cards, figure out where he is--not far from the old Wallace house, at least--and then get out and make it to his favorite 24-hour cafe with free wifi so he can find out what happened to Dante and figure out where to go from here.

The thing is, Bellamy doesn't _have_ to come to the human realm. He could just hang out in faerie all the time, like most gremlins do. Hauntings are considered old-fashioned these days, and dangerous on top of that, as humanity has gotten less superstitious and more skeptical. Dante brought in so-called ghost hunters on several occasions to prove that something supernatural was going on, but Bellamy didn't have much trouble fucking with them without any risk to himself. He'd even watched a couple of the episodes that resulted from the visits; they came out pretty well, if he does say so himself. It was fun.

So he'd like to keep coming back, living his odd, inter-realm life, but the antiques store isn't really the place for that. He can trip their alarms and watch the ensuing chaos and confusion from the nether shadows, but all anyone really seems to think is that some asshole kids are fucking with the antique store. Which, Bellamy has to admit, is a pretty solid hypothesis. Definitely more plausible than wardrobe gremlins. But it's not very satisfying, as hauntings go. 

Leaving to go do other human stuff is possible, but a definitely pain, so he doesn't go to the human realm very often over the next few weeks, just popping in every other day or so to check that nothing has changed, causing a little chaos from the shadows and checking his email to see if Netflix has added anything interesting he should be streaming.

The whole thing feels like a transitional phase, so when, about four months after Mr. Wallace's death, Bellamy slides out of the wardrobe and into the nether realm to turn off the alarms and finds there's nothing to turn off, it feels like the other shoe dropping. His life settling into its new place.

He slips into the human realm to take a look around, examining the new room with interest. It's smaller than any of the others he's been in and sparser, probably some kind of storage room. There's an easel with a half-finished painting on it in one corner, but aside from that it's all furniture, some of it covered it in white drop cloths, some of it not, all of it old and more than a little beaten up. As much as it pains him to admit it, his own wardrobe fits right in, and he can't help but worry this is where antiques no one wants to buy go to die.

Then he hears noise from outside the slightly open door, notices light down the hallway.

He checks his phone, functional now that he's in the human realm, to make sure it really is midnight. Obviously humans _do_ stay up this late, are awake at all hours of the day, from what he can tell, but he's always been with people who are in bed early.

He slides into the shadows of the wardrobe's new home, finds it's not some backroom of the store as he assumed, but instead a living space. An apartment, probably, small and a little disorderly. The noise and light are coming from the living room, where a blonde girl is stretched out on a couch, playing video games in a tank top and pajama pants.

Bellamy has met plenty of humans, even humans around his own age, but the sight of her is still a shock. Between Mr. Wallace and the antique-store owner, he didn't really think humans under the age of fifty had any interest in his wardrobe. He thought he was done with people who stayed up past midnight, but here she is, this strange woman swearing at her television.

Over the next several days, Bellamy lurks in the nether realm, watching his new human and trying to figure out how best to haunt her. As he suspected, she's young, a few years younger than he is and a year older than his sister. Her name is Clarke Griffin, and she's currently in med school. On the side, she's working on restoring old furniture, although that seems to be something of a new hobby. Every night after she finishes with whatever else she's doing, she'll come into the spare room and work on her various antiques.

She starts with a cabinet, and that's slow going. She's got some instructions she seems to have printed off the internet and this one seems to be her test piece, the one she's expecting to fuck up as part of the learning process.

If it was Bellamy, he would have figured out if he was any good at the whole restoration thing before he bought the stuff, but Clarke doesn't seem to be the kind of person who thinks failure is an option. And she is an artist--the canvas on the easel is hers too--so she probably thinks the skills carry over.

He gives it a full ten days before he tries haunting her, waiting until she's tired from a long week of work and done with her restoration work for the night. She's on the couch with a cider when he flickers the lights in the apartment, and she doesn't even seem to notice.

He does it again, and she makes a tired sound. "Stop."

Bellamy freezes, but Clarke doesn't follow up, and he realizes she's talking to the lights, not to him. Her tone is resigned, exhausted, and guilt spikes in his stomach.

Which is the wrong way to feel; he's a gremlin, it's his job to annoy humans.

He flickers the lights again.

"Don't make me call an electrician." She drags herself up off the couch, bones cracking as she stands and stretches. "Fine, I'll go to bed. I get the message."

All of his attempts to fuck with her go something like that. When he hides her things, she just assumes she misplaced them. When something rattles, she kicks the closest object to her and tells it to be quiet. Her assumption seems to be that she's so tired and her place is so shitty that there's nothing that can't be explained by simple incompetence, either on her own part or that of her appliances.

It's not rewarding enough to keep doing it, but that doesn't mean he gives up on the human world entirely. Clarke has a class schedule on the fridge, which means that he knows exactly when she's gone during the day, and he can actually come out of the wardrobe and participate in the human world during the day without risk. He can actually go to businesses that aren't bars, stores, or laundromats, visit museums and landmarks, get the real human experiences he'd been locked out of before.

It's during one of those human experiences that he, to his horror, actually sees Clarke in the wild, without any veil of shadows to protect him. There's a little coffee shop around the corner from her that makes an amazing chai latte, and he's in there reading an article about the video game she's been playing so he can keep up better when she just breezes in, hair in messy wisps and cheeks red from the cold. There's always been a layer of reality between the two of them, keeping her from seeing him, but also keeping him from seeing her fully.

He knew she was pretty, but she's so much better in full color.

She orders and goes to wait by the window, scrolling on her own phone. He lost track of time, hadn't even realized her class had ended and she'd come back. It's not nearly as hard for him to get back to his world as it is to get into hers, but it still feels strange, being in her apartment during the day. Like he's trespassing.

More than usual.

When she takes her to-go cup, he drains his own mug, buses his table, and makes it out the door less than a minute after Clarke. His brain doesn't catch up for another minute after that, when he realizes exactly what he's doing. There's no good way to chase a woman into her apartment, and he has no reason to be talking to Clarke in the first place. Talking to her is _stupid_. He's lowkey haunting her, he shouldn't be talking to her too. That's _actually_ inappropriate.

But when she gets to the apartment, he calls, "Hold the door?" She turns, surprised, and he flashes her a smile. "Sorry, didn't want to get my keys."

"No problem. New to the building?"

"Yeah, my grandfather and I just moved into number six," he says, the lie easy. He knows enough about the building to know that there is an older guy in six who moved in recently and never leaves. Clarke might figure out he was lying, but she doesn't talk to her neighbors much, and he's definitely not going to talk to her much.

Definitely.

"Oh, yeah, I saw the trucks."

"Bellamy," he says, offering his hand, and she shakes. Her hand is small, warm and smooth, the touch sending a small thrill through him. 

"Clarke. Number twelve."

"I think I followed you out of the coffee shop," he adds, nodding to her cup. Every logical, rational part of his brain is telling him to just _stop talking_ and _leave_ , but the part of him that knows how cute she is isn't having it. "I haven't been here for long, but I'm already addicted to their chai."

"I've never been a chai person," she says, absent, as she checks her mail. "Or, I've never tried it. I just want caffeine directly pumped into my bloodstream, so coffee it is."

"Well, I definitely recommend it."

"I'll keep that in mind." She looks him up and down, not checking him out so much as sizing him up. "How starved are you for human contact? On a scale from one to ten." At his blank look, she says, "Do you just hang out with your grandfather and never see other people?"

It's only a small lie. Especially compared to all his other lies. "Pretty much, yeah."

"Well, I've got alcohol and Netflix, if you ever want to hang out. As long as you don't mind that I'm studying."

"Studying for what?"

"I'm in med school."

"I wouldn't want to impose," he says, honest and a ploy all at the same time.

"What are neighbors for?"

It's stupid and reckless and absolutely nothing he is ever supposed to be doing, but he can't resist. He smiles. "Let me grab some beer and I'll be right up."

There aren't actually formal _rules_ for interacting in the human realm, just kind of norms and rules of thumb. The big one is to not ruin things on a global scale, but not getting too close to humans or getting too attached is in there too. Of course, fae _do_ leave their own realm, sometimes forever, but they don't just sit on couches, watching TV with humans they're supposed to be haunting. They usually do big, cool things, like Freddie Mercury. He knew how to leave the fae realm in style.

But Clarke's couch is nice, and she has wifi, plus subscriptions to all the streaming services he's never signed up for. And, well, she's taking such good _care_ of the wardrobe. It's not done yet, not like some of her other pieces, but she'll work on it off and on, and it's looking better than he's ever seen it. It's the kind of care Bellamy would have taken of it, if he could have. And he used to lurk in the nether realm to watch her work, but it's so much better when he can work with her, Clarke explaining what she's doing and letting him help her with varnish and treatments, patient and amused as he learns.

It's nothing he's supposed to be doing at all, and he's given up even pretending he's haunting her. He turns off the TV when she leaves it on and puts the things she leaves in odd places somewhere she can find them easily. It's an _anti-haunting_ , and it's taking up all his time.

"Seriously, we barely see you anymore," Miller tells him.

The point is fair; the only reason they're hanging out is that Miller popped into the nether realm and grabbed him. He's been kind of hard to reach lately.

"It's hard maintaining a fake life in the human realm," he says, which is true. He'd thought it wouldn't be that much more than he was doing before, but then Clarke said that she'd come get him at his grandfather's apartment when she got home, and he realized he needed to actually keep up with whether or not she was coming to see him. He had to get one of those pay-as-you-go cellphones so she could call him, once he realized he couldn't just upgrade the one he uses for internet without things he doesn't have, like personal information and a credit card. It's a lot of work.

"You don't say," says Miller, unsympathetic.

"I need to just tell her I moved," he says. "Sneak out while she's asleep like I used to do with Mr. Wallace."

"That's one really good option. Or you never should have started."

"I'm not going to put in a request for time correction just for this. I can fix it myself."

"Just saying, you knew this was stupid when you started, and you still did it. So I don't know why you think you'd stop doing it."

"I'll get it out of my system."

"You know how your sister and I never go to the human realm?" Miller asks, giving him a pensive look.

"Yeah."

"That's not hard. I'm not wishing I could go all the time. You used to bring Octavia and she didn't like it. Plenty of fae go their whole lives without going into the human realm, and you can't go more than a couple of days. You love it."

"It's--" he starts, the usual excuses coming to mind easily, but the words don't come out. It _is_ a family heirloom, the Blakes have always haunted this wardrobe, but he's gone far beyond haunting. And it's not as if anyone _cares_ if he haunts the wardrobe. Clarke never even noticed.

She'd notice if he left now, of course. He'd have to tell her something. He'd have to leave her. And he could still do all the things he loved in the human realm, get coffee and watch movies and get into wikipedia-editing wars on folklore articles, but it wouldn't be the same. Not now that he knows what it's like doing those things with her.

"Yeah," he says. "It's really cool."

"If you can't leave, you could always stay," Miller says, with a kind of practiced ease. "You wouldn't be the first fae who decided to live in the human realm. You just have to decide."

"You stalked the gateway between the realms just to tell me I should move?" he finally asks, and Miller shrugs.

"You weren't figuring it out on your own. The way I figure, I might see you _more_ if you were thinking about visiting here, instead of just stressing about your human girlfriend not figuring out you live in her closet."

It would be really great if that wasn't an accurate summary of his current issue, minus the girlfriend part, which is the only part he actually wants to be true. The worst of all combinations, really.

"Yeah," he says. "Good tip."

There is a process for relocating to the human world, everyone knows. He looked into it before, when he started feeling bad about just stealing everything and realized that he might want something like a credit card. But actually _doing it_ is such a huge step. And it seems so dangerous, when he could just tell Clarke his grandfather is doing well enough he could find his own place. He's already lying to her, shifting the lie isn't _that_ big a deal. 

It's not like he can tell her the truth.

He's back at the coffee shop on a Saturday morning, idly looking for apartments and jobs, trying to figure out what living in the human world would even look like, when his phone buzzes with a message from Clarke: _Are you busy?_

**Me** : Not really  
Getting coffee  
Working on my novel

**Clarke** : You should put that in scare quotes  
"Working" on your "novel"  
I won't believe it exists until you show me some actual words

**Me** : I really appreciate your support  
What did you need?

**Clarke** : Muscle  
I'm taking some stuff to Roan and I need help loading the car

**Me** : Sure  
You want coffee?

**Clarke** : You're the best  
Thanks

Before he was friends with Clarke, Bellamy would have just slipped into the nether world to get back into the building, but now that he's interacting like a normal person who's supposed to come to her door instead of out of her wardrobe, it's a little more complicated. He figured out a trick where he can slide just his hand in and open the door from the inside, bypassing the need for a key, and then pull his hand back.

It would be easier if he just lived here, honestly.

Clarke gives him a bright smile when she opens the door and he has to remind himself he doesn't get to kiss her. Instead, he hands over the coffee and says, "So, what am I helping with exactly?"

"Moving the refinished furniture," she says, and his stomach drops. "My friend Roan has an antiques store, I sent him some pictures and he said he could resell and give me a cut. It's easier than trying to do it through eBay, I don't want to handle shipping."

Bellamy had always known that, in theory, Clarke was going to sell the furniture she was working on, once it was done. And he's even pretty sure that the wardrobe isn't done yet. But once it is, it could go _anywhere_. She'll take it to the antique store, and it's going to look good enough that someone will buy it, and then he'll be somewhere completely new, some strange, totally unknown place.

The thought of it takes up most of his brain as he helps Clarke load her products. As he expected, the wardrobe isn't one of the pieces she's selling, but it feels like he can see a countdown on it, ticking down minutes and hours until Clarke finishes and moves it out of her apartment and him out of her life.

"Is it weird I forgot you were selling these?" he asks as he pushes a small cabinet into the trunk of her car.

She smiles. "No, I forget too. I'm actually a little sad, I got attached."

"Maybe they won't sell and your friend will give them back."

"Yeah, that sounds great," she teases. "Thanks for that."

"You're the one who doesn't believe I'm writing a novel."

"True, I probably deserved it. You want to come to Roan's? It's about an hour each way, so feel free to say no."

"Yeah, I've got some stuff to do," he says. "Serious writing, I'm probably turning my phone off. But I'll see you tomorrow?"

Her smile dims, but just a little. "You better show me some actual writing after this."

"I know. Good luck at the antique store."

"Thanks."

As final straws go, his wardrobe being (potentially) sold again is maybe a silly one, but it's easier to make an appeal around that than it is to admit that he's fallen in love with a human and he doesn't want to leave her. And, to be fair, even if Clarke doesn't feel the same way he does--especially if she doesn't--he still wants to keep track of the wardrobe. It's _his_ portal, and he needs to keep it.

The process is long less because it's rare for requests to be turned down--anyone who's applying is generally thought to be sure about it, permanent relocation isn't common--and it involves Bellamy having to actually be in his own realm a lot, coming up with a backstory, working out how he's going to live and get more human money.

He sends Clarke a lot of texts from inside her own wardrobe telling her that he had to leave town because of a family emergency--on his dad's side, not his mom's, so his grandfather wouldn't be involved--and he's aware, as he crouches in there, how fucking _complicated_ the whole thing is. His life would be so much easier if he could just tell her, if his entire story didn't sound faker than any of the lies he's come up with. He can't just tell her he's a gremlin who fell in love with her while she was restoring the wardrobe which he uses as a gateway into her world. Even though he could theoretically prove it, it's not a conversation he knows how to start.

When Clarke opens up the wardrobe door while he's texting her, it sort of solves that problem.

They just stare at each other for a long moment, too surprised to actually say anything, until he finally manages, "I thought you had class."

"It's spring break." She crosses her arms over her chest. "You break into my apartment when I'm at class? I haven't even seen you for weeks."

"It's, uh--it's not like that." He wets his lips, scrambles to his feet. "Fuck, it's such a long story."

"You don't say."

"You're not going to believe me."

"Probably not, but try me anyway."

Her mouth is a hard line, her jaw set, and he really should have figured out how to do this sooner, or at least not have been hanging out in her fucking wardrobe, no matter how safe it felt. He has no one but himself to blame, absolutely saw this coming, but some part of him is still vaguely resentful. It's an overall bizarre situation, but he was doing his best. He couldn't just tell her the truth; it was too fucking weird.

"Your grandfather had never heard of you, by the way," she says, twisting the knife. "So keep that in mind with whatever you're telling me."

He exhales. "There's a portal to another realm in the wardrobe, I live in that realm, I was trying to haunt you, but you're so disorganized you didn't even notice when I was fucking with you. But then, uh--you were fixing the wardrobe and I saw you at the coffee shop and I wanted to talk to you, so I did. And I kept on wanting to talk to you. Fuck, Clarke, you're--I know how unbelievable all this sounds, but I swear it's true."

Her face gives nothing away as she thinks it over, and Bellamy makes himself keep his mouth shut. If she's mad, he can always leave, go home, give up on the whole _moving to the human realm_ idea. His wardrobe will go somewhere else, and he'll probably be smart enough to not fall in love with its next owner.

"If that's a lie, it's the stupidest lie I've ever heard," she finally says.

"Yeah, my actual lies were a lot smarter. I didn't think you'd ever talk to the guy in six."

"I was _worried_ ," she snaps. "Why were you sitting on the wardrobe floor?"

He holds up his phone. "Cell reception. I wanted to text you. I don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to check in."

She takes another minute to process, and then says, "Okay, so--how does this work? What are you? A ghost?"

"No, uh--gremlin."

Her eyebrows shoot up. "Gremlin?"

"Yeah. We guard gateways to the human realm. This one's been in my family for generations. It's been at the Wallace house since before the Civil War, but the owner of the house died and his son sold--at least the wardrobe, I don't know what else."

"And you just come into this world to hang out."

"We don't have the internet," he says. "The fae realm is fine, but kind of boring."

"So you've just been--sneaking out of my apartment, breaking into the building, coming back up here, and knocking on my door so you can hang out with me? How do you get back in to leave?"

"There's another realm, the nether realm?" She looks dubious, and he soldiers on. "It's kind of like--the shadow world. I can slip into that and then you can't see me. But I can only get out of it in the wardrobe, so it's still kind of a pain. I've been wanting to tell you, but I didn't think you'd believe me."

"Can you go into the nether world?" she asks, sounding interested. "And do something?"

It's a logical question, but it still makes his palms sweat. He'd never really let himself think about telling her, let alone her believing him, his having to live with her knowing the truth. If she does know what he is, he doesn't know what comes next.

Apparently, he's going to find out.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Whatever you were doing to haunt me."

He wets his lips, puts his phone in his pocket, and then he finds a shadow and slides into it. He can see Clarke's eyes widen as he disappears, and she leans into the wardrobe, trying to find him. 

As tricks go, it's a pretty good one. 

He can't actually move things directly in the human realm, but anything he's carrying will be pulled into the nether realm with him, so he takes one of her paintbrushes and drops it, making her jump and whirl as it clatters to the ground. He does it again, with her watching this time, and she swallows hard.

"But you can only come back out through the wardrobe," she says, and then laughs. "I guess you can't answer me."

He did test it out, when he was trying to haunt Mr. Wallace, but humans can't hear him here. The veil is too thick.

"Can you touch me?"

That one he's never tried, so he crosses the room, reaches out for her hand, his curiosity getting ahead of his common sense. Humans can enter the fae realm, if they're shown the door, so there shouldn't be any reason that she can't come into the nether realm with him too.

Instead, when his hand curls around hers, he feels himself sliding through the shadows and back to her, like she's her own gateway all by herself.

"Apparently, yeah," he says, and she laughs, breathless and surprised, tugs his hand until he steps in, and she kisses him.

He melts into the kiss, relief making him boneless, and mouth curls into a smile.

"You believe me?"

"I have more questions. But I really wanted to do that."

"Me too." He wets his lips, still grinning. "So, uh, I was going to move to this realm and ask you to sell me the wardrobe. And then ask you out, once I had my own place and a job and stuff."

"You can buy a wardrobe without a job, but not ask me out?"

"Buying the wardrobe was less scary."

"I wasn't going to sell it anyway," she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. "It's the one we did together."

Once the wardrobe is done, they move it into the bedroom (once Bellamy has assured Clarke that it's inaccessible from the fae realm unless he opens it), across from their bed, next to the mirror, this perfectly sized space that looks like it was specially made.

It wasn't, of course, just like the left side of Clarke's bed wasn't made for Bellamy, no matter how well he fits there.

Sometimes, things just work out.


End file.
